Agent skills

MCP tools expose what Glyphs MCP can do. Agent skills describe how an agent should use those tools for a specific job.

This matters because type-design work is contextual. The correct action often depends on the current font, master, selection, metrics keys, kerning groups, or selected nodes. Skills encode the repeatable habits that keep those sessions predictable.

Why skills help

Skills help agents:

• choose the narrowest useful tool profile
• read context before acting
• prefer dedicated tools over free-form code
• use dry runs before mutation
• avoid auto-saving
• fetch only relevant bundled docs through docs_search and docs_get

Current skill bundle

Skill	Use it for
glyphs-mcp-connect	Startup checks, endpoint verification, and list_open_fonts.
glyphs-mcp-features	OpenType features and stylistic-set glyph groups.
glyphs-mcp-kerning	Kerning bumper review and approved apply steps.
glyphs-mcp-spacing	Spacing review, dry-run, and approved apply steps.
glyphs-mcp-outlines-docs	Outline edits, selected nodes, components, anchors, and focused docs lookup.
glyphs-mcp-italic-first-pass	Guarded roman-to-italic first-pass copy and slant workflows.

The skills are intentionally narrow. They are not a second documentation system; they are operating instructions for common agent workflows.

Source of truth

Authored skills live in skills/.

The repo exposes them to clients through:

• .agents/skills for Codex
• .claude/skills for Claude Code

The installer can also copy the same skill bundle into global skill directories for Codex and Claude Code.

When to invoke a skill

Name the skill when you want the agent to follow the workflow:

Use the glyphs-mcp-spacing skill to review spacing for the selected glyphs and do a dry run first.

Continue with Use skills for setup details.